Gottesmann looked at his gloomy figures: Of the 1,214 Jews in Safad, only 140 are armed, and only 260 in all are capable of fighting. The real proportion as between Jewish defenders and Arab attackers, augmented by reinforcements from without, must therefore be considered to be about forty to one. Yet the capture of Safad by Jewish forces was essential to the preservation of a Jewish state or to the winning of the war that would accompany its establishment. For Safad commanded the hills, and just as it had been vital to the Crusaders in 1100 C.E. as a salient protecting Tiberias and the roads to Acre, and to the Mamelukes in 1291 C.E. as a point from which to control the rest of Galilee, so now in 1948 it was again a site overlooking the jugular vein of the area. Taking into consideration the overwhelming superiority of Arab numbers, the United Nations had logically awarded Safad to the forthcoming Arab state, but if it were allowed to remain in Arab hands the viability of any Jewish nation would vanish. As the days of the mandate drew to an end, Safad became the vital target for Jews in the area, and it was held by the Arabs, 11.1-to-1.
As he completed his notes he used the contemporary spelling, Safad, pronounced Sfat in one syllable to rhyme with spot. Like all the places of Galilee this fortress town had known many different names: it had originally been Sepph, then Sephet, then Safat; Crusaders had known it as Saphet, historians as Safed, the Arabs as Safad, map makers as Tsefat, and Hebrew nationalists as Zefat. In similar manner Acre had been Akka, Accho, Ptolemais, St. Jean d’Acre of the Crusaders, and now purists were calling it Akko; but the most notable of the variations had occurred with the Sea of Galilee: at first it had been known as a sea called Chinnereth, from the resemblance of its shoreline to a harp, then Kinnereth, then Gennesaret, Galilee, Tiberias, Tverya, Tabariyyah, Tyberiadis to the Crusaders, and to the Turks, Bahr Tubariyeh. For the English it became Lake Galilee and was to be Yam Kinneret, with the second word accented on the second syllable.
Isidore Gottesmann, satisfied that his figures on Safad were in final form, closed his folder and leaned back. He was sure that later on that evening, when Teddy Reich and his Palmach lieutenants came to review the situation, Teddy was bound to say, “We’ve got to capture Safad. Get going, Gottesmann.” The unhappy soldier smiled wryly: Everyone calls him Teddy but they call me Gottesmann. Because I look like a skinny Englishman. And because I like it that way.
He thought back upon the times when the calling of his name by some Englishman had been of critical significance: That night after we blew up the bridge inside the German border. The English major heading the underground had said in his crisp, unemotional manner, “Splendid show, Gottesmann. You’re for Antwerpen.” And that had been the difference between life and the extermination camp, for those who had not made it to Antwerp had been caught and killed. Or the night in the Belgian port when another English underground operative had called, “One more place in the lorry. Look lively, Gottesmann,” and this, too, had been the selection between living and dying, for on the following week this Antwerp ring had been penetrated by the Nazis. He also remembered the time when he had stood at attention in dirty civilian clothes as a professor announced to a motley crew, “And for the University of Norwich, Gottesmann. You did well in your papers, lad.” At graduation his German-Jewish name had been called crisply and he had moved into the British army, then into Syria and later into Italy—always at the command of British Gentiles who were generous in recognizing his merit and in granting him their approval.
But later the voices calling him had changed to Yiddish, the hard, tough voices of small, tough men: “Gottesmann, we’ve got to ship these refugees to Eretz Israel. Rent a boat at Taranto. I don’t know where you’ll get the money. Get it.” And the voice of Teddy Reich, who was even tougher and smaller than the others, all brain and sinew: “Gottesmann, you’ll take this dynamite to Tiberias and wait till the lorry …” Just before the suitcase exploded a British voice had cried with agonizing despair, “My God, Gottesmann! What have you done?”
It had been while hiding from the British after this dynamiting that he had been smuggled into Kfar Kerem, where he had made his way to the home of Netanel Hacohen. Tapping softly on the door he had aroused a tall, square-jawed Jew, who said gruffly, “If they’re chasing you, come in.”
“I met your daughter in Jerusalem.”
“She’s not here. But you must be Gottesmann and I suppose you blew up the lorry. Welcome, son.”
That night he had seen for the first time the haunting portrait of little Shmuel Hacohen, his left shoulder protruding as if he wanted to fight, his eyes flashing with notable vitality. “He was killed by Bedouins while fighting to protect this land,” Netanel explained. “When the first trouble started the others wanted to give up the vineyards and retreat to the walls of Tiberias, but Shmuel preached, ‘We’ll build walls greater than any Tiberias has seen. Out of our love for the land!’ ”
“Preached?” Gottesmann interrupted. “Was he a rabbi?”
Shmuel Hacohen’s son laughed. “Shmuel? A rabbi? When he died he was fed up with rabbis. There were no rabbis in this family. The Jewish state will be born when enough men like my father take enough guns and shoot down the bastards who are threatening us. When my father was fifty he organized his own little army to protect this settlement and he bought himself a donkey so that he could ride from one watch station to the next, firing his men up. The Bedouins announced to the whole countryside, ‘We’ll kill the little Jew on the donkey, and the others will run away.’ So they killed him. When we recovered his body it had nineteen bullet holes. But his faith had been so strong that no one dared run away, and after two or three battles the Bedouins left us in peace. Gottesmann, to hold this land we had to fight for it. If we want a state for the Jews we’ll have to fight for it. You did a fine thing when you blew up the lorry.”
“I asked about the rabbi business because I saw these volumes of the Talmud,” Gottesmann said.
“Those?” Netanel laughed. “Somebody sold them to my father and he kept them for good luck. Shmuel Hacohen … you could sell him anything. His preaching was simple, Gottesmann, and you remember it. No state is given on a silver plate. You buy with blood. Rabbis and governments and fine ideas will not win this land. Guns will. You get the guns, you’ll get Israel.”
And then one day, as Gottesmann lay hiding, Netanel hurried into the room, explaining, “You’ve got to get out of here. My daughter’s coming home from university,” and Ilana appeared, somewhat thinner than when he had seen her in Jerusalem, lovelier when she smiled but more serious and totally dedicated to the ideal of a Jewish state. When she saw Gottesmann packing she said, “Don’t go,” and later, when he recalled that first meeting, he remembered principally the great tenseness of her mind and body. She stood forward against her toes, not back on her heels. Her chin was held forward too, like her stubborn grandfather’s in the picture, and her eyes, unlike those of girls Gottesmann had known in other countries, were marked by lines of concentration. Above all, he remembered her tough, rounded knees as they popped out from beneath her very short dress, and he recalled how delightful it had been, in his hiding, to touch those knees and to feel this vibrant girl, so eager for life and the day’s challenge, pressing against him.
Now he laughed easily as he heard her banging about the kitchen in her last stages of preparing his evening meal. She was a dreadful cook, a typical Israeli she called herself, burning her thumbs and the meat, and she slapped food on the table as her ancestors must have slammed it on the wooden boards in their tents four thousand years ago in this very spot, when returning from their sheep in the wilderness. How excellent a human being she was, this Ilana, how strong in her resolves, and how desperately her husband wanted to stay away from the war that was engulfing him … how he longed to stay with his wife among the vineyards.
Yet in his longing Gottesmann had to admit that not even under the humane law of Moses Rabbenu was he excused from this war, for although he did have a new house and a new vineyard, he did not actua
lly have a wife. He and Ilana were not married. In the tempestuous fashion of the day she had simply moved in with him, announcing to the settlement, “Gottesmann and I shall live together.” He had expected some kind of protest from her father, but tough-minded Netanel had summoned two witnesses before whom the lovers recited the ancient formula: “Behold, thou art consecrated unto me according to the law of Israel,” after which Netanel boomed, “You’re married. Have lots of children.” Certain cautious neighbors had suggested that perhaps Gottesmann and his girl would like to have a rabbi from Tiberias authenticate the marriage, but Ilana had cried contemptuously, “We’re through with rabbis and all that Mickey Mouse crap.”
The phrase had struck Gottesmann as inappropriate to the discussion at hand and he had asked Ilana, “Where did you pick up the words ‘Mickey Mouse crap’?” and she had explained, “When you go to the movies and watch the cartoons the hero gets into all kinds of trouble, but at the end, when terrible things are bound to happen, Mickey Mouse swings in from nowhere and saves the world. Gottesmann, it doesn’t happen that way. And for sure it’s not going to happen that way in Israel”—Ilana always spoke as if her new homeland already existed—“because nobody is going to come swinging in from anywhere, not God nor Moses nor some rabbi. So let them keep that Mickey Mouse crap to themselves. Fifteen thousand Arabs are going to come down out of those hills some day, and we’d better be ready.” Her eyes flashed and she repeated, “We’d better be ready. Not Mickey Mouse. Not some rabbi wringing his hands and wailing, ‘Israel is lost. Israel is being punished.’ ” Recalling that outburst Gottesmann looked down at his folder and smiled.
Behind him the door banged open. There was a clatter of feet. A tray was banged onto the table and a chair was squealed backward over the stone floor. “Food!” a husky-harsh voice shouted, and supper was served at the Gottesmann home.
Ilana Hacohen was twenty-one, not tall, not plump. Her big white teeth sparkled as ever, and as usual she looked quizzical. She obviously loved the security and repose of living with a man and she took pride in her new home. With heavy yet loving hands she pushed the crockery about the table and splashed a generous helping of food onto her husband’s plate. It was meat and vegetables, cooked as if by accident, and it made him long even for the food of English restaurants. “Eat it all,” she said. “I’m saving some for Teddy Reich.” Then, on the impulse of the moment, she leaned across the table and kissed her tall, serious-browed husband.
“You worried about Safad?” she asked.
“For every Jew in Safad there are 11.1 Arabs,” he said glumly.
“If they’re the right Jews,” she reflected.
“And the Arabs hold all the favorable positions.”
“They always do,” she said.
“And in honest fighting strength they outnumber us forty to one.”
When Ilana chewed she kept the food in small portions in the right side of her mouth and moved her jaws only slightly, so that she seemed unusually reflective, with her thin upper lip drawn tight and the lines about her eyes contracted. She thought of the odds, forty to one, and of the position of Safad as she had known it, now so critical to the Jews. “It looks to me,” she said slowly, “as if Teddy Reich ought to move his Palmach in there tonight.”
Isidore Gottesmann visibly stiffened. He stopped chewing and looked down for a moment at the white boards of the table. Ilana regarded linen as ridiculous in time of war; she didn’t propose washing table covers when there was other work to do. When her husband did not speak she said quietly, “And if Teddy decides to send his men in, you and I are going too.”
“I guessed we would,” her husband said, and they continued eating.
Ilana Hacohen knew Safad well. Her grandfather had been killed by the Bedouins long before she was born, and she had never known him, but she remembered well the happy days when her father used to take her on horseback up the steep trail to Safad, from which they could see the Sea of Galilee and Tiberias. As they stood on the old Crusader ruins her father would explain how from this spot the Jews had looked down upon the great Roman city of Tiberias, when large fleets had stood out into the lake, and of how, in later days, a group of misguided bigots had assembled in Tiberias to write the Talmud, “thus binding the world in chains.” He said that some centuries later, around 900 C.E., a much finer body of rabbis had also worked in Tiberias, “compiling the only honest text of the Bible, so that Tiberias is just as important for the Christians as it is for the Jews.” But it was his opinion that the only rabbi from these parts whom one could love was Rabbi Zaki the Martyr. “He was a great and honest man,” he said, “and all could trust him.” Of contemporary rabbis, except for Rabbi Kook, he did not know many who could be so described. He told his daughter, “Always remember, in this country we have the best rabbis that money can buy.” They were a grubby, contemptible lot and old Shmuel Hacohen had decreed that none should be allowed in Kfar Kerem.
This did not mean that Ilana had grown up without religion. In her father’s house the reading of the Torah was exactly equivalent to the reading of Shakespeare in the home of an educated English family, or the reading of Goethe among Germans—except that because of its antiquity and historical power the Jews of the settlement felt that their great literary masterpiece was somewhat more effective than Shakespeare was for the English or Goethe for the Germans or Tolstoy for the Russians. Rarely a day passed in Ilana’s childhood when she did not hear some practical discussion of the Bible as the historical background of her people. She knew that Kfar Kerem stood where Canaanites had once ruled and that on their victorious return from Egypt the Jews had surged northward through the valleys to the west. She could imagine them still marching, just beyond the ridges back of Tiberias. To Ilana, God’s division of Canaan among the twelve tribes, which had taken place some three thousand years ago, was as real as the proposed United Nations division that would occur within a few weeks: Kfar Kerem stood at the junction of the portions given to Naphtali, Issachar and Manasseh, and it was from these lands that the citizens of Israel had been driven into captivity. Mount Tabor still stood as the perpetual beacon of the north, and the Sea of Galilee remained as Isaiah had described it. To the sabras of Ilana’s generation the Bible was real indeed. In her father’s vineyard she had found Jewish coins that had been issued by the Maccabees, and she could recall that day on which her father had taken her to see the recent excavations at Beth-shan, pointing toward familiar places on the Plain of Jezreel. “Why did he do it?” he had cried.
“Do what?” Ilana had asked.
“Keep his troops here at Gilboa while the enemy was camped over there at Shunem.” And he explained why the man had been a fool, a blunderer.
“Who was?” she asked again.
“King Saul,” her father replied. To the Jews of Kfar Kerem, Saul was a man of history, not a shadowy figure in a religious chronicle, and so with Gideon, David and Solomon.
Like most of her friends, whose parents were either non-religious or actively anti-religious, Ilana Hacohen bore a non-Biblical name. Hers meant tree and spoke of the ancient soil. Other girls bore evocative names like Aviva (spring), or Ayelet (fawn), or Talma (furrow). Young men were apt to be called Dov (bear), or Arieh (lion), or Dagan (cereal). Ilana was determined that when she and Gottesmann had children there would be no Sarahs or Rachels among them, no Abrahams or Mendels; she wanted no part of the old Biblical names nor of the Eastern European ones either. In fact, her only disappointment with her husband was that he kept his German name of Isidore, one relating in no way, she felt, to a modern Jewish state.
It would be difficult to say whether Ilana and her father were religious or not. On the one hand they loved the Bible as the literary textbook of their race. On the other, they despised what the rabbis had made of it. “A prison!” Netanel Hacohen cried. “And the Talmudic rabbis who worked here at Tiberias were the worst of the lot, codifying into ugly little categories all things that God intended to be free.” He also looke
d unkindly at the work of the later rabbis who had lived in Safad: “In their exile in Spain and Germany they picked up many bigoted ideas and came back here to force them down our throats.” There were others in Kfar Kerem who were so disgusted with rabbinical Judaism that they went much further than Netanel Hacohen. These Jews were prepared to throw out God and Moses, too.
Ilana knew some of these latter thinkers and she found their reasoning persuasive. “We are Jews,” they argued, “and it is our job to reconquer Palestine. When we do we won’t require a lot of rabbis from Poland and Russia to tell us how to govern ourselves.” Women of this group were apt to be especially vehement in their denunciation, and it was from one of these, a girl at the university who had lived in America for some time, that Ilana picked up the phrase which seemed to her the best summary of the religious problem: “that Mickey Mouse crap.”
Among Ilana’s friends a curious cult had developed which could be explained only as a combination of deep love for the Bible and an equally deep distrust for institutionalized religion as they had seen it operating among the Jews of Galilee. Many girls flatly refused to get married in the old rabbinical patterns. “Me take a ritual bath?” Ilana had protested. “I’d sooner jump in cattle water ten days old than step naked into that Mickey Mouse crap.” Her girl friends sought out the men they wanted to live with and in swift progression became pregnant, fine mothers and good heads of their families. They also refused to wear make-up, that being the prerogative of purposeless women in decadent countries like France and Argentina. It became an act of faith not to shave under the arms, to avoid make-up, to wear very short skirts, to bob the hair and to take advanced training in the management of machine guns and field mortars—if any were made available by the men who needed them. These girls also spoke only Hebrew, fluently and with an earthy lilt. Yiddish they deplored as an echo of the eastern European ghettos, and Ladino was as bad. Those whose parents knew no Hebrew consented to talk with the old folks in whatever language was native, Russian with the Russian immigrants, Polish with the Polish newcomers, but Yiddish was frowned upon. “It’s a ridiculous mark of servitude,” Ilana protested, “and Gentiles are correct in laughing at it.”
The Source: A Novel Page 114
